Voice cloning has moved from a niche AI capability into a heavily funded market, and ElevenLabs is now one of its most visible companies. The startup has closed an $80 million Series B round, bringing its total raised to $101 million and valuing the company at over $1 billion.
The funding highlights both the commercial demand for synthetic voices and the unresolved risks around abuse, consent, and compensation. ElevenLabs is growing quickly, but its tools have already been tied to serious misuse and criticism from voice actors.
A major funding round for voice AI
ElevenLabs develops AI-powered tools for creating and editing synthetic voices. Its $80 million Series B was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and entrepreneur Daniel Gross.
Other participants included Sequoia Capital, Smash Capital, SV Angel, BroadLight Capital and Credo Ventures. The new valuation marks a sharp rise from ~$100 million last June.
CEO Mati Staniszewski says the company will use the funding for product development, infrastructure, team growth, AI research and stronger safety measures. He told TechCrunch the raise was intended to reinforce ElevenLabs' position in voice AI research and product deployment.
The company was co-founded in 2022 by Piotr Dabkowski, an ex-Google machine learning engineer, and Staniszewski, a former Palantir deployment strategist. The two founders, who grew up in Poland, were motivated in part by the poor dubbing they heard in American films and believed AI could produce better results.
What ElevenLabs is building
ElevenLabs is best known for a browser-based speech generation app. Users can type text and generate a recording read by default voices, while paying customers can upload voice samples to create new voice styles using voice cloning.
The app lets users adjust qualities such as intonation, emotion, cadence and other vocal characteristics. That flexibility is central to the company's pitch: synthetic speech can be shaped for different formats, characters and audiences.
ElevenLabs is also pushing beyond basic text-to-speech. The company is investing in tools for audiobooks, film and TV dubbing, character voices for games and marketing activations.
Last year, it released a “speech to speech” tool designed to preserve a speaker's voice, prosody and intonation while removing background noise. For movies and TV shows, the tool can also translate and synchronize speech with the source material.
Its near-term roadmap includes a dubbing studio workflow for generating and editing transcripts and translations. A subscription-based mobile app is also planned to narrate web pages and text using ElevenLabs voices.
Customers, usage and rapid scale
ElevenLabs has attracted customers in publishing, media and entertainment. The source names Paradox Interactive, the game developer behind recent projects including Cities: Skylines II and Stellaris, as well as The Washington Post.
Staniszewski claims that users have generated the equivalent of more than 100 years of audio through the platform. He also says employees at 41% of Fortune 500 companies use ElevenLabs.
Those figures explain why investors are paying attention. Synthetic voice technology can serve many different markets at once, from entertainment production to workplace content and marketing.
But the same features that make the tools useful also make them difficult to police. A voice that can be generated quickly, shaped precisely and made to sound lifelike can be used for legitimate production work or for impersonation and harassment.
The misuse problem is already visible
ElevenLabs has faced public examples of abuse. The message board 4chan used its tools to share hateful messages imitating celebrities such as actress Emma Watson.
The Verge's James Vincent was able to maliciously clone voices in seconds and generate samples containing threats of violence as well as racist and transphobic remarks. Vice reporter Joseph Cox documented a clone convincing enough to fool a bank's authentication system.
In response, ElevenLabs has tried to remove users who repeatedly violate its terms of service, which prohibit abuse. The company has also released a tool intended to detect speech created by its platform.
This year, ElevenLabs plans to improve that detection tool so it can flag audio from other voice-generating AI models. Staniszewski also says the company wants to partner with unnamed “distribution players” to make the tool available on third-party platforms.
Consent and compensation remain unresolved
Voice actors have also criticized ElevenLabs over the use of voice samples without consent. Their concern is that synthetic versions of their voices could be used to promote content they do not support or spread mis- and dis-information.
A recent Vice article described victims who said ElevenLabs was used in harassment campaigns against them. In one example, a cloned voice was used to share an actor's private information, including their home address.
The broader fear is economic as well as personal. Motherboard has reported that voice actors are increasingly asked to sign away rights to their voices so clients can generate synthetic versions that may eventually replace them, sometimes without commensurate compensation.
Some companies are trying to create formal licensing models. Earlier this month, Replica Studios, an ElevenLabs competitor, signed a deal with SAG-AFTRA to create and license digital replicas of union members' voices. The organizations said the deal set “fair” and “ethical” terms for consent and negotiations around digital voice doubles, though some voice actors, including SAG-AFTRA's own members, were still unhappy.
ElevenLabs is pursuing a marketplace for voices. Currently in alpha and expected to become more widely available in the next several weeks, it lets users create, verify and share a voice. When others use that voice, the original creators receive compensation, according to Staniszewski.
For now, that compensation is not cash. The current setup gives creators credit toward ElevenLabs' premium services, a detail likely to keep the debate active as the company grows from 40 people to 100 by the end of the year.